2 disparate dramas

There can perhaps be no two melodramas currently showing at the Manila Film Festival as different as Maryo J. delos Reyes’ Naglalayag (Silent Passage) and Joel Lamangan’s Sabel. While both films rated "B" from the Cinema Evaluation Board entitling their respective producers to a substantial tax rebate, the two directors have their own separate approaches on how to tell the parable of the misfit in society.

Naglalayag can perhaps be considered a comeback film for Nora Aunor, proving that there is always life after endorsing her lookalike President Arroyo. One might be tempted to subtitle the movie as Classic Guy and the Perpetually Smiling Man, since the leads Aunor and Yul Servo work out an onscreen chemistry that is as disparate as their ages in this May-December romance. Aunor in particular is in fine form, being able to convey the slightest emotion and nuance through those expressive eyes. And Servo’s constantly smiling, kenkoy demeanor pushes forward the film’s overall likeability, indeed it is difficult to put down a delos Reyes movie that tackles an adult theme in such a wholesome, sensitive manner.

The gap between the Aunor and Servo characters is not merely in age but also in social status, as she is a judge who has been handling controversial, even heinous cases, while he is a taxi driver and occasional mechanic. What brings them together is the stalling of the Servo character Noah’s taxi in a flood with the judge as passenger, so she has to spend the night in the nearby slum area where taxi driver resides with his family, including his mother played by Jaclyn Jose, who here is depicted as about the same age as Aunor.

Oedipal subtext aside, there is not a semblance of Greek tragedy in Naglalayag, though Noah’s dad (played by Pen Medina) who is also a taxi driver gets murdered by robber passengers. Noah’s stepping up to be breadwinner and falling for an older woman seems to be one of fate’s little tricks, that when he in fact meets the same fate is not so much deus ex machina but a suggestion of elimination of the species (oops).

A pregnant judge slowly walking to the bier of her lover young enough to have been her son is awkward so as to almost be classic; you’re afraid she might give birth right then and there to replace the dead man/dead son. The emotion-filled sequence is done with adroit restraint, with the interplay of the excellent supporting cast of Jose and Chanda Romero: a fitting frame for Aunor’s pang-award performance. Some might consider the scene a failure in directorial nerve, but you either love it or hate it, there is no middle ground in this offbeat romance.

Aleck Bovick as the third party in this triangle is a pleasant surprise, suggesting that the award she won not too long ago was no fluke. Why the Servo character would exchange her for Aunor beats me, but stranger things have happened in both love and war.

The cinematography of Naglalayag is excellent, the lighting almost tableaux-like though not on the level of the almost-art film feel of another delos Reyes work, the superior Magnifico.

And speaking of offbeat and square pegs somehow fitting into round holes through a little filing and curing around the edges, Lamangan’s Sabel features for its part the redemption of the abnoy, the triumph of the dysfunctional family against the odds stacked up against it by both tradition and the establishment.

Sabel as played by Judy Ann Santos is a very sympathetic character, first as a nun who gets raped by an inmate in a medium security prison, the character played by Wendell Ramos, whose underacting verges on the wooden but is actually right for the role and the combustible situation he finds himself in.

As it turns out, Sabel comes from a profoundly tattered family, so that her angst is not only justified but also feeds on it: the death of her musician dad (Alan Paule of Macho Dancer fame) from an obscure ailment, her control freak obstetrician of a mom in Rio Locsin, herself rather amiable and still sexy after all these years.

Lamangan, working on a script by the multi-awarded Ricky Lee, makes ample use of flashback to flesh out the Sabel character, and what possibly led her to walk out of a sudden from her live-in arrangement with her lover-boy slash rapist slash reformed convict. When we find out that she has made her way to Baguio, that cluster of happy memories with her late dad, it comes hardly as a surprise, except for her now mutual lesbian relationship with the t-bird Tony, portrayed brilliantly by the underrated Sunshine Dizon.

When Sabel meets up with the Wendell character again, she is already a jailbird accused of murdering a no-good rapist of a budding warlord out to grab ancestral lands from the highland Ibalois. Again the twists in plot are alternately predictable and jarring, yet Judy Ann comes through with a shining performance, one that could rival Aunor for the Best Actress plum on awards night.

Like Naglalayag, Sabel comes up too with a strong supporting cast, from Iza Calzado (whom I earlier thought was Bea Alonzo, similar cheekbones) to Rio Locsin, from Al Tantay as Wendell’s dad to Sunshine Dizon.

That both movies rated "B" could mean that they had diverse, yet worthy stories to tell, and neither do they insult the viewers’ intelligence nor speak down to the hoi polloi audience, who will find in either film enough comfort to last through the hard-won day.